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Sunday, November 22, 2015

Living, Dying and Understanding

Last week, posts began to pop up on facebook that a boy I had went to school with had died. At first I assumed that maybe it was drugs because I wasn't sure what type of path he'd went on but then it became known that it was something else that was not preventable and not his fault. Regardless of how he died, it really upset me.

We were in the same math class in sixth grade and sat in the same table grouping. He was a bit of a troublemaker but super nice and so so funny. I remember he had this running joke going that he had a pet squirrel named "Squirrelly" who had died in the Tsunami the year before. It sounds stupid and probably a little insensitive to all of the people who had died but I'm telling you....it was so funny. Sometimes he would randomly pretend to cry about Squirelly and once he drew a little picture of him getting sucked up by a tornado (yeah, not a Tsunami that time I guess!). I thought he was hilarious and had a little crush on him and his "badboy" image. I remember him goofing off in chorus and the teacher having to sing out his name to get him to pay attention.

I didn't see him much after middle school but from time to time he would pop up and I still thought he was cute and funny. And now he's gone.

It's weird, because outside of that one year in math class, we weren't really friends and so many people knew him a ton better than I did. But I knew him as a 12 year old who liked to make jokes and draw funny pictures.

And he only made it to age 22.

He's the first person I graduated with that died and he won't be the last. It's a reminder that life is fleeting, it truly is. On Friday I had a professor say that life is very, very long. It was such an ignorant thing to say, because even if you life 99 years, it's not long in comparison to eternity. 22 years isn't long at all, but that's all this boy got. His life is over and I'm still going on living. Why me? I don't know.

God could choose to take any of us at any time and this is why we have to make the most of every minute of our life. It's the blink of an eye.